Level 31 Troll

To Earthend and beyond!

hi! i’m crayoncakes, I was in a thing a while back where a bunch of people were “hired” to create content for the game for ~real life money~. I left because JB liked to make ~hilarious joekz~ because I was the only woman on the team and the chat set up for us had too many creepy enjoy jokes for my taste. oh, and literally the only voice bits they had planned for women were porno ****! but this topic isn’t about that, it’s about how hilarious he got after I left.

long boring suck up email, you might wanna skip this, mostly here so you can compare and contrast~

Hey crayoncakes,

Thanks for getting back to me and thanks for your honesty. I had not been expecting that reaction, so I’m glad you brought it to my attention.

First and foremost, Fortunato is mortified about his pornographic audition text possibly being the last straw that motivated you to leave, and for what it’s worth, he’s apologized and removed that entry. I just noticed it myself, and agree it’s wholly inappropriate. Basically, he had just thrown together some vaguely offensive, archetypal text and didn’t bumign it to any NPCs until he’d gone through the list. It definitely has nothing to do with Thinderella, but he should have come up with something different.

As for the other notes you made below, I understand where you’re coming from, but I feel I need to explain myself.

We’re aware that one of the weaknesses of our game is a lack of female voices, and the fact that the main character usually comes off as male. We still get occasional complaints about it to date. There are no real excuses for it, other than the fact that when we created Forumwarz — it being the product of four relatively idiotic guys — we just did it in whatever voice came naturally to us and that happened to be that of a male. To maintain consistency, we tried to keep P1’s voice the same throughout the storyline, keep things funny, and generally pander to the audience.

We’ve attempted to explain the player’s identity better in Episode 2, although I think we’ve called much more attention to it in Episode 3. Several times, Player 1 refutes accusations of guy-hood. There’s a mission where HugMastaRandy repeatedly insists that you’re female, which is the other side of the coin. Also, the conversation is not shared yet, but at some point your character says to Shallow Esophagus that you’ve never said you’re either male or female, but people tend to treat you that way because of their expectations so you tend to go along with it. Player 1 is generally “role-playing” as a dude, just as s/he is role-playing as a number of clbumes within the forums. Kind of lame, but it’s the only way we can rationalize the fact that it’s generally a strain to make a completely gender-unspecific character, and it would probably be very noticeable if we did.

We’re painfully aware of our limitations as writers, which is why I was excited to have some Apprentices who happened to be female. I apologize for when I said “need to be able to write for a female NPC” — I didn’t mean to present the female characters as a “bonus” whereas the default should be male. I was just being forthcoming about the male-skewed nature of our writing team and openly admitting that, not only do we not have enough female characters, but that our attempts to write for female characters have probably come across as inauthentic. I would have thought that my attempt to correct this imbalance would have been appreciated. But, as my girlfriend will attest, I can’t do anything right.

As for “I picked you to write that character because you are female,” it was a bad throwaway joke, and I apologize for it. Of course, the fact that I also admitted that I wanted more female writers to bring authenticity to our female characters belies the fact that there’s clearly some truth to that statement. So, I’m sorry for ghettoizing you this way, as that was clearly not the right way to go about it.

I appreciate that it can be tough to be a woman in a male-dominated area like web games, comics, video games, etc. I’ve worked in TV writers’ rooms and this is a constant issue for our female staffers. Sometimes, it can be a bit much; hopefully you weren’t too soured by this experience. I only wish you had said something earlier.

I still think you’re one of the most talented writers we’ve had on this site, so it hurts to see you go. Last year, you became the first Forumwarz user to receive actual money for one of their contributions, and I was hoping you would bring some of that magic to this season’s Elite.

Nevertheless, I wish you the best in all you do and hope you’ll stick around to see how Episode 3 turned out.

Sincerely,

JB

I was kind of ****ed about having to leave a job thing because other people were ****ty so I left a sarcastic message asking to just be removed from stuff and he got hella ****y

Actually, “embarrbuming” is sending a long, suck-up apology email to someone and instead of receiving a cursory acknowledgment in return, being notified of a post like yours by the rest of my team.

As per your request, I’ve manually removed you from all the Elite forums, all three subforums and about 70 Google Docs. It only took about half an hour, but it’s not like I have anything better to do on a beautiful Saturday morning in the waning days of summer.

I’m unable to change the permissions on the “Prefixes” Doc, as Chawin is the owner of that one. Until he remedies this, I hope you don’t suffer too much indignity, as I’m sure it’s a blemish on your record that haunts you constantly.

Facepalmingly yours,

MD

****ing ****, i sent you an apology and you didn’t tell me it was all okay now? how fukken dar u

I signed on today to unsubscribe from the ad I got today and found this

With your flat, hurried diction and lack of punctuation, it was hard to tell whether you were joking or not. So I took you at your word.

Try posting it on scribd, so we’ll see if I’m the only one dumb enough to bumume that.

And then, post this: You’re a douche and you did us a favor by kicking yourself out. So thanks.

DAMN DEM SICK BURNS

so with the scribd thing i’m pretty sure he wanted this all posted so here ya go

Oh, also a few months after I had left the site I found he has subscribed to an old twitter of mine, so I guess he kinda stalked me too?

Level 44 Emo Kid

I had the first bum avatar.

A lot of this is ancient history, but I may as well offer my side of the story.

I agree that I shouldn’t have expected crayoncakes to accept my admittedly tl;dr apology. I was more upset that she later posted what I thought was a confidential exchange on Flamebate, and then again on scribd once we removed it — to be honest, I don’t even remember what it was. But that explains my last Tubmail, which I sent nearly three years ago.

The whole part about removing her from Google Docs was from something she posted in the Creative Sweatshop:

crayoncakes Posted:

actually it would be nice if you would just remove me from everything since i’m kind of embarrbumed I was involved in this thanks

She later said she was just joking, but I had no idea at the time!

To address a couple of other things, I should point that crayoncakes was not the only female member of the creative team. We can’t forget plk (who won the Apprentice contest), Odalisque and spacekadt.

The “porno” voice thing was just something one of the writers drafted for the character Thinderella on a whim. Everyone agreed it was lame and inappropriate, and it never made it into the game.

Finally, I’ll point out that it’s been a long time since crayoncakes was around, but since then we’ve tried to learn from our mistakes and make Forumwarz’s ~hilarious joekz~ more inclusive with our Emasculation contest. And I think we did a pretty good job.

Anyway, I’m still sorry that you had such a negative experience here. And now that it’s out there, I’m sorry for calling you a douche. That was very immature of me.

Hi, I'm an adult whos into bumes. But not boners!

Level 31 Troll

To Earthend and beyond!

Jalapeno Bootyhole Posted:

A lot of this is ancient history, but I may as well offer my side of the story.

I agree that I shouldn’t have expected crayoncakes to accept my admittedly tl;dr apology. I was more upset that she later posted what I thought was a confidential exchange on Flamebate, and then again on scribd once we removed it — to be honest, I don’t even remember what it was. But that explains my last Tubmail, which I sent nearly three years ago.

The whole part about removing her from Google Docs was from something she posted in the Creative Sweatshop:

She later said she was just joking, but I had no idea at the time!

To address a couple of other things, I should point that crayoncakes was not the only female member of the creative team. We can’t forget plk (who won the Apprentice contest), Odalisque and spacekadt.

The “porno” voice thing was just something one of the writers drafted for the character Thinderella on a whim. Everyone agreed it was lame and inappropriate, and it never made it into the game.

Finally, I’ll point out that it’s been a long time since crayoncakes was around, but since then we’ve tried to learn from our mistakes and make Forumwarz’s ~hilarious joekz~ more inclusive with our Emasculation contest. And I think we did a pretty good job.

Anyway, I’m still sorry that you had such a negative experience here. And now that it’s out there, I’m sorry for calling you a douche. That was very immature of me.

The only things I posted on scribd were the same messages I’ve posted in this thread, so I could show my friends.